


Archangel Flare

by sequence_fairy



Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, But only a bit, F/M, I promise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-25 15:05:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9825776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequence_fairy/pseuds/sequence_fairy
Summary: There’s a ping to his left and Ichigo pulls up short. He turns, both his eyes and sensors scanning, and there she is, suspended in space, the light of the fiery remains of her suit reflecting across the closed visor of her helmet.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> AU with a lot of space, and a bit of angst and liberally applied tropes about confined spaces and near death experiences.

Space is generally pretty boring in Ichigo’s opinion - mostly empty with the occasional planet and sometimes, something hostile to kill, but generally, there’s very little to do out here out on the far reaches of the Central Systems. 

This mission was supposed to be a quick in and out to reconnoitre this system regarding the viability of an H3 mining operation, and get back to The Seireitei for a couple of weeks of downtime. However, they’ve run into trouble - the kind of trouble that shows up with weapons powered up, and seems to be able to outmanoeuvre even Commander Kuchiki - Rukia Kuchiki, pride of her house and one of the best pilots in the corps, save himself.  

Ichigo swears as tracer fire lights up his tactical grid. He zeroes in on his own target, lining up and firing with a flick of thought while the remainder of his attention is focused on watching Rukia. 

She’s in Sode no Shirayuki, ducking and weaving as she leads the group of enemy craft through the maze of tumbling ice and rock that makes up this planet’s ring system. Another target pops on Ichigo’s display and he takes his eyes off Rukia’s spiralling trajectory in order to shake off his own tail.

When he turns back, Rukia is nowhere to be seen. Ichigo calls up his sensor array, layering it over his tactical grid and it pings almost immediately with her comm signature. He looks up in time to see Rukia peel away from her pursuers as they come around the far side of a particularly large ball of ice-packed rock. The silver-white skin of her mobile suit flares as it catches the reflected planetlight. 

“They’re still on your six,” Ichigo mutters over their commlink, and he hears Rukia’s acknowledgement before he notices the the telltale energy signature on his tactical grid. There’s a breath of time before they fire, and then Sode no Shirayuki is obliterated in a hail of gravity charges and the flash of her pulse drive overloading.  

“Rukia!” Her name jumps out of his mouth. All he can think is that he has to get to her, he has to get there before her suit runs out of air, she has to have ejected - she had to have seen that coming.

Ichigo swerves towards the explosion, pulling desperately on his control stick, and pushing Zangetsu to its limits. The HUD flashes dire warnings about g-forces, energy reserves and proximity across his eye line and Ichigo dismisses them with a thought, throwing himself and his armor through debris-riddled space to reach her in time.

“Goddamnit,” he snarls, sending his suit into a spiral to avoid a shredded piece of Sode’s hull. It knocks against his flank and Ichigo feels the crunch of it through the shielding before he slips past it and on to find her. He’s shouting mental commands at the nav panel, demanding that it search for her comm signature in the debris field and ignore everything else.

There’s a ping to his left and Ichigo pulls up short. He turns, both his eyes and sensors scanning, and there she is, suspended in space, the light of the fiery remains of her suit reflecting across the closed visor of her helmet. 

Ichigo cycles down his thrusters and circles wide around Rukia, careful to keep her out of his wake. She hangs, motionless, spine in a graceful arch and arms outstretched. Ichigo’s stomach bottoms out. He swallows hard before blowing out a deep, slow breath and re-centering his mind on Zangetsu’s controls.

He reaches for Rukia, cradling her gently in the left-hand of his armor, before drawing his arm back to bring her closer. Ichigo locks the arm in place before unlatching himself from the pilot’s chair. He vaults towards the airlock and pulls the inner door shut behind him. Fingers numb and blood roaring in his ears, Ichigo fumbles at the control panel to start the oxygen de-saturation process. A mechanised voice reminds him of the pressurising time but Ichigo ignores it, throwing the latch open without waiting. Air hisses out into space, and Ichigo takes one more deep breath in, before slipping out after it.

Ichigo crawls hand-over-hand down Zangetsu’s arm to reach Rukia and gathers her into his arms. He pulls her back across the suit with him, careful not to jostle her before dropping back into the airlock with her. He slams the door shut behind them. Now that he’s back inside, the computer barks a warning at him about energy reserves again and Ichigo ignores it, again. Instead, he waits impatiently for the airlock to announce that it has equalised and re-saturated, before tugging off their helmets and tossing them into a corner of the cramped space.

“Rukia!” he yells, his face inches from hers. She stirs, coughing once, before taking a shuddering inhale. He forgets himself in the rush of that breath, forgets there is rank and protocol to follow, and instead, he breathes with her, crushing her smaller form to his. She smells like fried circuitry and the aching cold of deep space.

“Get off me,” she says eventually, voice muffled into his shoulder. Ichigo lets her go. He refuses to acknowledge that his hand is trembling when he brings it to her face. His gloved fingers skate along her jaw. Her impossibly violet eyes flare wide when he touches her but she doesn’t move away. Ichigo thinks he can feel her pulse, but maybe that’s just his own, hammering against the blood vessels in his fingers.

The moment hangs between them, like the inexorable pull of gravity.

Ichigo breaks the silence. “Are you hurt?”

Rukia shakes her head. “Ejected before she blew.”

Zangetsu’s warning system interrupts them.

_…Proximity alert…impact in five, four, three, two –_

The impact sends Zangetsu into a barrel roll and pitches Rukia out of his arms. Ichigo scrambles back into the pilot’s seat, and hauls on the controls, trying to arrest the spin. The HUD flashes a string of warnings at him and alarms ring shrilly through the cockpit.

Ichigo silences the alarms and swears viciously as he fights against inertia and g-force in order to right himself. Rukia’s hands are wrapped around his upper arm in a grip so firm he can feel it through the thick material of his exosuit. She doesn’t make a sound, only squeezes him tighter when the yaw finally lessens and Ichigo is able to get them into some semblance of a straight line.

“Systems check?” Ichigo asks, somewhat tentatively, and the computer rattles off some very alarming results - shields failing, more warnings about energy reserves, and a new one - life support, 78% and dropping. Ichigo turns to Rukia and she looks at him, and they both turn to look out the view screen and the expanse of space yawning out before them.

They are several hundred thousand kilometers from help. Ichigo sweeps the area with the suit’s sensors automatically, but they turn up nothing; no pursuing force, not even a communications buoy. There is only the never-ceasing hiss and crackle of the radiation from the gas giant through his open commlink. Even at this distance, it still looms largely behind them.  

“What were they anyway?” Rukia asks and Ichigo shrugs. 

They were like nothing he’s ever seen before, and he sure as hell isn’t going to waste power reviewing sensor logs to find out. “Don’t know, don’t care.”

“We’ll have to report –”

Ichigo gapes at her. “Rukia, we are stranded. I’m down to reserve fuel, and even if I start turning things off to save power, there’s a leak in the core - we’re not going to have to report this to anyone. On the off-chance that The Seireitei is even looking –”

“Giving up already, Lieutenant Kurosaki?” Rukia interrupts, and Ichigo is forcibly reminded of the protocol he disregarded earlier. “that’s not like you –“

“Commander,” Ichigo interjects, “with all due respect –”

Rukia snorts, and Ichigo decides to hell with protocol anyway. “Give it a rest will you?” he huffs. “And stop talking, you’ll use up all the air.”

“I’ll use up all the air? Well shit, Ichigo, we wouldn’t be in this predicament if some reckless idiot hadn’t gone tearing into a battlefield after me, now would we?”

Ichigo chooses to ignore that remark and gestures to the auxiliary station to his left. Rukia huffs before beginning a thorough scan of the suit’s systems to see exactly how dead in the water they are.

(They are very dead in the water)

Ichigo sits back with a defeated sigh, before turning to Rukia. She turns to face him, and they share a look. Ichigo’s mouth tightens. He drops his eyes first and taps out the distress sequence, signalling the suit to launch a series of short-range flares while also running the signal on loop through all of the Central frequencies. Privately, he thinks this is all very pointless, given that the radiation from gas giant will cloud all but the most sophisticated of sensor arrays, but he does it anyway, because he can’t very well sit there on his hands and do _nothing_.

“Now, we wait,” Ichigo says, and Rukia nods. There’s a pause, and then Ichigo brings a hand up to the back of his neck, before gesturing to his lap, “not like there’s really anywhere else to sit.”

The corner of Rukia’s mouth turns up. “No funny business,” she intones, before sinking onto his lap, and turning to face the viewscreen. The countdown for their air supply runs in the bottom left hand of Ichigo’s HUD and he dismisses it and the rest of the overlays with a thought. The stars gleam in the black, unfiltered now, except for the radiation shielding.  

“So,” Rukia drawls, and Ichigo knows she’s just trying to fill the suddenly cloying silence. “Read any good books lately?”

Ichigo snorts. “Manuals for Zangetsu’s engine upgrades, you?”

“Not all of us have time to read for pleasure, _lieutenant_ ,” Rukia retorts and she feels, rather than hears, Ichigo stifle a laugh.

“Fine then, _commander_ , what do you do for fun?” Rukia shrugs and they fall silent.

After a while, she starts asking him questions about Zangetsu and his training and Ichigo keeps up a running commentary on the minutiae of his life until he came under the command of one of her colleagues and rose through the ranks of his squadron in nearly record time. This was supposed to be his final mission before being given his own command, and Ichigo wonders now if they’ll give his bars to his sisters along with the neatly folded flag.

He shakes off the morbid turn of thought and looks out over Rukia’s shoulder. He wishes, impotently, that they were closer to one of the more settled systems - there’d be a much better chance of someone finding one of their flares before the air runs out and they suffocate quietly in their sleep.

A display comes to life to his left and Ichigo turns to look. His remaining CO2 scrubber is down to 50% efficiency, and Ichigo takes a deep breath in, letting it out slowly. Rukia turns her head to follow his gaze.

“Well,” she says, and Ichigo doesn’t respond. There’s nothing to say really. He completes another long-range sensor sweep and determines that their flares are still active and checks that the comm system is still shouting their distress signal out into the void, but there’s nothing else within range. Ichigo decides to be happy that their enemies have, so far, also stayed out of range - they are sitting ducks now that he’s taken weapons offline to boost the shields, as they float through the outer edges of the planet’s rings.

“Are you good at hangman?” Ichigo asks apropos of nothing, and Rukia half-turns in his arms. She’s striking in profile, with the backdrop of the stars behind her. The reflected light of the displays throws her face into shadow and deepens the violet of her eyes. “We could also play twenty questions. I might even have a deck of cards in my go bag –“

Rukia interrupts him with a finger pressed to his mouth. “Shut up,” she says, “stop talking, you’ll use up all the air.”

“Just trying to pass the time,” Ichigo says when Rukia drops her hand. They fall silent again. Ichigo shifts, resettling himself into his chair and Rukia tenses before relaxing against him once more.

“How long?”

Ichigo is taken aback by her question and takes several moments to formulate a response. “Does it matter?”

“No,” Rukia answers, after a long silence of her own, “I suppose it doesn’t.” She turns to look back out at the starfield and Ichigo feels her settle against him, her head resting on his shoulder.

Time stretches, as it is wont to do when it’s running out. Ichigo had always thought that he’d be able to feel it slipping out of his fingers, but instead, it’s thickened and stagnated around them. Ichigo thinks about his sisters, about their bright eyes and their small hands waving at him when he’d boarded the transport back to headquarters after his last visit home. There’s a small part of him that is glad they’ll never really know, that he’ll just be reported missing in action, presumed killed, and that it’ll be unlikely anyone will ever find out what really happened. At least this way, they can go on thinking it was a good death, and not this cold, inevitable end.

He’s not alone though, and he’s grateful for that. Having Rukia here, breathing next to him, her chest rising and falling steadily as she watches the sky pass while they drift, is more than he ever thought he’d have. She’s warm, which is a welcome relief against the seeping cold that is starting to swell in the dark corners of the cockpit as Zangetsu turns into the heat sink a hunk of metal in the freezing depths of space becomes.

He times his breaths to hers, matching her inhale to exhale, and when he feels her hand reach for his and curl around his fingers, he does nothing but tighten his hand around hers. They sit, hand in hand, staring out at the black.

“Hey,” he says, when the silence becomes oppressive, and Rukia hums acknowledgement without turning. “I told you about me, tell me about you?”

“What’s there to tell?” Rukia asks, but Ichigo waits. He knows some of it - she grew up rough, bouncing from station to station until she was adopted by the Kuchikis and fast-tracked through officer training - but what he doesn’t know could fill volumes.

“I don’t remember my parents,” she starts, and Ichigo feels a squeeze of something in his chest. The wound of his mother’s death is scabbed over now, but there’s always a pang of sympathy when someone mentions their own lost parents.

“I barely remember Fatima Station - it was always cold, you know? Something wrong with the climatization.” Rukia shivers, and Ichigo resists the urge to rub her upper arms. “After that we - my sister Hisana, and I - found our way to Lourdes.” There’s a heavy weight of memory behind the way Rukia says the name of the station and Ichigo contemplates asking her about it, but Rukia presses on without giving him the chance. “Things went wrong, and we hopped the next freighter out. Hisana bartered us passage through The Gate and that’s how we ended up on Inuzuri.”

Ichigo knows Inuzuri Station. It’s not a place for the child he knows Rukia was at the time.

“Hisana and I, we –” Rukia pauses, takes a breath, and continues “– we got separated.” There’s another pause in the telling, and Ichigo doesn’t press, just lets Rukia find the words she wants to use. “That first year, I was probably about 7, maybe 8? Anyway, I fell in with one of the local gangs of children and yeah, sometimes it was rough, but there were others to share it with, so it never seemed as hard then as it does looking back.”

Rukia shakes her head. “You know all of this already though, don’t you?”

“Some of it,” Ichigo answers, and Rukia turns to look at him. “I wanted to hear it from you though.”

“Why?”

“It’s the kind of story you want to hear from the person who lived it.”

Rukia doesn’t say anything else, and Ichigo lets her have her silence.

In the interim, he pulls up Zangetsu’s systems statuses, and checks their air supply and dismisses the information without saying anything. They have maybe two hours, two and a half at the absolute outset, maybe closer to three if they put their helmets on and use up what’s left with their rebreathers.

At some point after that, Ichigo hears the CO2 scrubber cycle down and out of commission and he rouses himself enough to see if there’s anything to be done about it. Rukia lets him work, watching his hands fly across the touchscreens. He manages to locate the failure - but there’s nothing he can do about it from inside the suit and going outside means they’ll lose valuable air opening and closing the airlock.

“We’ve got an hour, maybe an hour and half,” he says, pointing to the warning flashing across his screen. Rukia nods. “We could probably give ourselves another hour on top of that with the rebreathers in the helmets.”

“No,” Rukia says, but it’s a sigh.

“Hey!” Ichigo says, voice sharp. Rukia looks up at him. Her eyes are glassy and unfocused. She blinks slowly. “Did you hit your head or something?”

“I don’t –” Rukia shakes herself visibly, and this time when she looks at him, her gaze is clear. “I don’t remember hitting my head.”

“You should take the rebreather,” Ichigo suggests and leans forward as if to get up. Rukia presses a hand to his chest to stall his movement. Ichigo stills but doesn’t relax.

“Why? So I can watch you die instead?”

“Because it’s _better_ for me to watch you die?” Ichigo asks, incredulous. “Commander – _Rukia_ – you are clearly in more need of the oxygen then I am, and who knows, The Seireitei might come for us after all.”

“They’re not coming, Ichigo.” There’s a finality to that statement that makes Ichigo’s heart sink. “They’ll never find us in the radiation cloud. I’m not stupid, I knew this was pointless.”

Ichigo’s mouth twists. “I’m sorry,” he says, and Rukia’s lips curve into a brief smile.

“It’s okay,” she says, “thank you anyway.”

“For what?”

“Saving my life.”

“Fat lot of good that did,” Ichigo grouses, and Rukia raises a hand to cup his chin, forcing him to look at her. Sincerity shines out of her eyes and Ichigo drops his gaze, unable to face it. Instead, he finds his focus drawn to the silver chain around her neck. Beneath his shirt, his own tags are heated by his skin and he’s so used to wearing them now that he can’t even feel the chain around his neck. He wonders, if they’re found, who will get hers.

“Ichigo,” Rukia says, her voice soft. There’s something in it that makes him look back up. Their faces are so close now that Ichigo can see all the fine hairs at her hairline, and the sweep of her eyelashes across her cheek when she blinks is like soot on porcelain.

“Rukia,” Ichigo breathes, and he swears to a god he doesn’t believe in that time stops completely. He doesn’t even think his heart is beating. Rukia drops her eyes first, and then her hand. Ichigo’s next exhale ruffles the hair on the top of her head where she’s pressed her face into his chest.

_… Oxygen saturation below safe levels. Life support at 20%…_

“Can’t we turn that off?” Rukia asks, turning in Ichigo’s arms to look back out into the debris field. Ichigo mutes the computer’s voice, and looks out with her.

There are things he could say now, but it feels cheap to have waited until they were literally dying in each other’s arms to say them, so he doesn’t. There’s no cowardice in this, just acceptance. Something about the way she said his name before - no artifice in her expression, only wide-eyed acceptance of their end and the husk of her voice trailing off into silence - Ichigo thinks he was probably not as circumspect as he thought he was.

He was never going to leave her to die out there alone. Since that first day he’d seen her, standing on the catwalk in the hangar, petite and fierce and lovely and shouting into some idiot recruit’s face - there’s no room for dissembling now. Rukia was fearless in the face of whatever the abyss threw at them on any mission, and this one was no exception. She never backed down, and Ichigo has to hand it to her, he’d never have gotten as far as he has without her constantly dogging at him to drive him forward.

It’s slow this death - creeping and silent and Ichigo finds his eyes closing with heavy lids that he has to force open. In his arms, Rukia is still, and Ichigo clutches her close to his chest. The air is thin enough now that he can feel his lungs burning, feel his cells clamouring for air, for any oxygen at all.

Ichigo takes a breath. Rukia’s chest rises and falls, almost imperceptibly. There’s almost no air left now, and he can feel his blood turning sluggish underneath his skin. Ichigo thinks about reaching forward and completing one last sensor sweep, just to see if anyone’s coming, but his arm won’t seem to obey his brain, so instead, he tightens his grip on Rukia and gives into his closing eyes.

 

-

 

_…kcchhhh – tenant Kurosa – kcchhhh…_

_…this is The Sei–scchhh… -ome in?…_

_…_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pining, a touch of angst, a bit of trauma and the set up for part three! See what happens when I have other projects I am supposed to be working on? I work on something else.

Ichigo wakes up.

Which, is a surprise. He’d resigned himself to dying, was mostly alright with it even, and now here he is, awake. Ichigo slits his eyes against the harsh glare of medbay lights, and props himself up on his elbows to take in his surroundings.

He’s alone.

It takes a moment for that to sink in, and when it does, Ichigo feels as though he’s been knifed in the gut.

_Rukia._

If they got him, why didn’t they get her too? Was he too slow? Had she been injured in the explosion? He would have noticed, there’d been no blood –

but but  _but_  –

the way she’d slurred his name –

A wave of nausea swamps his senses. The breath is knocked out of him and he lays back, panting, eyes closed tightly against the reality of his situation.

He lets the hiss of recycled air through the vents lull him back into unconsciousness.

The next time he wakes up, she’s there next to him, and he watches her eyes widen and her lips curve into a subtle smile.

“Yo,” he says, voice rusty with disuse.

“You should rest,” she says, and lets go of his hand before standing.

“So should you,” Ichigo admonishes, but Rukia waves off his concern.

“I’m fine - you’re the one who had a serious case of oxygen deprivation.”

“As if you didn’t,” Ichigo retorts, and Rukia arches an eyebrow.

“I’ll have you know –”

Rukia is interrupted by Ishida’s snort from across the medbay. “Sit down before you fall down, Commander,” he says mildly and Rukia sits down. Ichigo barely suppresses the sound of mirth that bubbles up at her unthinking obedience. “And don’t  _you_  get any ideas, Lieutenant.”

Ishida crosses the room. “You both nearly died of exposure,” he says, checking the monitor next to Ichigo’s bed, and tapping at a holographic datapad. Ichigo watches a display of his lungs branching out in 3D. Ishida pokes at and expands a sector of bronchial tree. “You also inhaled a great deal of whatever you brought in with you when you left Zangetsu to get Rukia - which, may I remind you, is against standard operating procedure. I want to keep you overnight. You’ve got a node.” Ishida points out the offending abnormality.

Ichigo peers at the display. “Is that - “

“No, it won’t kill you. However, I will not be held responsible for what might kill you if you keep doing stupid shit like getting out of your mobile suit in the middle of deep space.”

“If I hadn’t - “

“Spare me the sob story, Lieutenant,” Ishida says, walking away. “Visiting hours are over, Commander, you can come back tomorrow.”

Rukia squeezes Ichigo’s hand. “I’ll come back later,” she says, softly.

“You will not.” Ishida does not turn around. Rukia leaves, and Ichigo listens to the sound of her boot heels as she walks away.

“How long?” Ichigo asks when Ishida returns to his bedside. The dark-haired doctor looks down at his charge and then pushes the bridge of his glasses up his nose.

“Nearly twenty-four hours - you were both almost gone when we found you.” Ishida drops onto a wheeled stool beside Ichigo’s bed. “What were you  _thinking_?”

“I wasn’t,” is all Ichigo says. Memories flash across his mind - the nearly blinding light of Shirayuki’s pulse drives exploding, Rukia hanging, suspended, in zero gravity, the feel of that first inhale after they collapsed into Zangetsu’s airlock, the way her face had looked, lit by planetshine and starlight –

“Of course you weren’t.” Ishida interrupts Ichigo’s train of thought. “I’ll keep you overnight, and then you’re grounded until I’m sure this node isn’t anything serious.”

“Grounded? Why? I thought you said I’d be fine?”

“And you will, most likely, be completely fine, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t make absolutely certain, would I?” Ishida stands. “Get some rest, I’ll be back for rounds before the shift change.”

Ishida leaves Ichigo, alone, in the med bay.

Elsewhere, Rukia stares into the cup of now cold tea she’s holding between her hands. There’s a fine tremor through her whole body that makes the liquid vibrate, and Rukia wills herself to relax. It was a close one, but she’s fine, Ichigo is fine, everyone is  _fine_.

The Seireitei is on its way to a supply station now, and the stars slip past the window in her quarters. Rukia sets her mug down on the ledge, and draws her feet up under her body, resting her head on her palm, staring out at the black. She’d pestered and cajoled Ishida into letting her return to her own quarters rather sooner than the doctor would have liked. He’d relented eventually, after being unable to come up with a reason why getting the rest he prescribed couldn’t be done in her own space, and Rukia had left the med bay, Ichigo still out cold on the cot beside her.

But now, with just her own thoughts for company, Rukia can’t stop thinking about the hitch in Ichigo’s voice when he’d said her name, the way his eyes had shone brilliant amber, even with the glare off the monitors. He’d held her so carefully in his arms, he’d gone spacewalking to save her life, he’d made her laugh as their air was running out, and even though she knew he must have been feeling as hopeless as she had, he’d done a much better job of hiding it. When she’d woken up that first time, crushed to his chest, all she’d been able to hear was the steady throb of her own heartbeat until she’d inhaled and then all her senses had come crashing back in.

Her face had been all but buried in his neck, his skin warm against hers and his hands splayed across her back like he was trying to hold her together by sheer force of will. His face was buried in her hair, and she could feel him trembling all over. She remembered the way his hand had shaken, when he’d lifted it to her face, and catches herself lifting her own hand to touch her cheekbone where he’d touched it.

There’d been a couple of moments, trapped on Zangetsu, where she’d thought he might throw protocol entirely out the window, but he’d never quite crossed the line. Rukia wonders what it says about her, that she wishes he’d done something, wishes in that last, quiet moment, before she’d lost consciousness, that he hadn’t just pressed a kiss to her hair, but that he’d whispered something too.

Rukia sighs, drops her hand and relegates that train of thought back to where it belongs and picks up her mug to take a sip. She makes a face at the bitterness of the brew and gets up, padding across the floor of her quarters to make another cup before scooping up a datapad and sitting back down, with the intention of logging a record of the last couple of days. She makes it as far as entering the stellar date before her eyes start to droop.

Rukia wakes up to the sound of a general ship-wide alarm. The datapad has come to rest propped on her chest and there is a crick in her neck when she tries to straighten. She gets gingerly to her feet, managing to roll the cramp out of her neck just as general alarm blares again. She spares a glance out the window of her quarters, noting that they’ve dropped out of FTL.

Rukia sighs, sets the datapad down again, and leaves her quarters. She threads her way through the orderly procession of people heading to battle stations for the lift to the bridge.

While in the packed lift car that stops on almost every deck between her quarters and the bridge, Rukia has time to think about the nature of the alarm, and also, to wonder about Ichigo in the med bay. She’s still stood-down, and with Shirayuki destroyed in the firefight at the gas giant, she wouldn’t have anything to fly even if she wasn’t under medical order not to.

The cause for the alarm turns out to be nothing she needs to even be a part of, and she is summarily dismissed from the bridge. She decides that instead of going straight back to her quarters, she will go and visit Ichigo, who is probably going stir-crazy in the med bay.

She arrives to find the place all-but deserted, and Ichigo sitting at one of the workstations, chin in his hand, pecking at the screen listlessly. He looks up when the door thuds closed behind her and Rukia gets the full force of his smile. He is like the sun, she thinks, and she is drawn to him, like a moth to flame. Ichigo remembers himself after too brief of a moment and the smile dims. He gets to his feet, and snaps her a salute.

“At ease,” she says, automatically, suddenly unhappy to be forced back into their previous roles. Ichigo relaxes, barely. “Oh, sit down,” Rukia huffs, “it’s just us here.”

She takes her own advice and snags one of the wheeled stools with her foot to push it towards where Ichigo is sitting. “Aren’t you supposed to be resting?”

“Ishida’s just a worry-wart,” Ichigo replies, and then he flicks a hand at the screen, throwing what he’s looking at up into three dimensions in between them. It’s the flight recorder data and telemetry from their firefight. “See this?” he says, standing to point to a spot where Shirayuki’s purple flight path intersects with the weapons fire from their still-unidentified assailants. “I was too far away, Zangetsu’s missiles never would have made it in time.”

“If anyone should have done anything differently, it should have been me,” Rukia says, backing the model up several seconds. “I got cocky, and careless – see?” Rukia points to where she got pinged by the targeting radar of the attacking ship. “Thought I was outsmarting them, when really, they were laying a trap.” Rukia lets the model run, watching the tiny Shirayuki explode and then, for the first time, seeing Ichigo’s search for her in the wreckage.

Their attackers had taken off as soon as they’d blown up her mobile suit, zipping away towards the gas giant and then around it’s far side. Zangetsu had tracked them with it’s sensors as far as it could, but Ichigo had diverted most of their power towards finding Rukia, not concerned about gathering intel with her life hanging in the balance.

Rukia sits down, the holographic model shimmering around her as she does. Ichigo looks over at her, and then flicks the model away with a harsh sweep of his hand. Rukia doesn’t see, because she’s back in the cockpit of Shirayuki, the suit’s proximity alarm blaring and her mind racing. She remembers, now, that she’d heard Ichigo yell her name over the comm, that his voice had crystallised the panic threatening to override good sense. She’d looked up as she was entering the eject sequence, and seen Zangetsu, hurtling towards her, and then there was the hiss of the hydraulic launch and the shockwave of Shirayuki’s pulse drive exploding and then nothing, until she woke up in Ichigo’s arms in Zangetsu’s airlock.

What if he hadn’t found her? What if they’d circled back and picked her off in the rubble? Or gone after Ichigo after they blew her up? Rukia can’t breathe. Her vision tunnels, and she can’t stop gasping for air; it feels like someone is sitting on her chest. She hears the whine of Shirayuki’s pulse drives, feels the breathless weightlessness of ejection into space. The med bay lights spin, and Rukia pitches forward, arms thrown out to break her fall.

She never hits the floor.

Strong arms tighten around her, and she ends up in Ichigo’s lap. He’s holding her the same way he was in the air lock, arms wrapped across her back, as if he means to keep her from flying apart. Rukia’s heart is still racing, and she gulps air like she’s oxygen-starved. Ichigo doesn’t say anything, just offers himself as a buttress upon which to rebuild her composure.

After several long moments, Rukia lifts her head, to find Ichigo looking down at her. “Alright there, commander?” Ichigo asks, and Rukia flushes scarlet.

“I– uh, I’m sorry,” she says, utterly mortified.

“Don’t worry about it,” Ichigo dismisses her apology. “We’ve both … been through a lot the last couple of days. I figure one breakdown each is covered.” His mouth quirks in a half-smile and Rukia feels hers doing the same.

“Better call me next time you have a nightmare then, Kurosaki.”

Ichigo grins for real this time, and then he laughs. Rukia cannot help but join in.

Ishida finds them, sitting cross-legged and face to face on one of the hospital cots, when he comes in for rounds before shift change. Between them is the remains of what some might call a meal, but Ishida calls nutritionally deficient. “Having fun? I believe this is a medical establishment, and not your personal rec room, Lieutenant Kurosaki.”

Rukia has the grace to blush, but Ichigo shrugs. “So release me under my own recognizance then, warden.”

Ishida sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Fine. I want you back here at 0800 for your follow-up. Do not be late.”

“Sir, yes sir!” Ichigo snaps Ishida a salute, and before she can say anything, grabs Rukia’s hand and pulls her along behind him. This is a different kind of rush than the panic before, it picks you up and pulls you along but doesn’t pull you under. Rukia revels in it. He leads her as far as the lift in the corridor and then looks down at their joined hands.

Rukia follows his gaze, and squeezes his hand. “Your quarters or mine?”


End file.
